


Does it Bother Anyone Else (that someone else has your name)

by DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Background Relationships, Fluff, Gen, Human Disaster Keith Kogane, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, M/M, Minor Allura/Matt Holt/Shiro, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Zoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 11:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9656189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee/pseuds/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee
Summary: “I have good news and bad news.”“Okay, shoot.”“I met my soulmate today.”“Good news?”“Maybe. Bad news is he’s an idiot who fell in a tiger enclosure at the zoo trying to get a camera out of tree.”“Oh my god, is he okay?”“Concussion and lots of bruises and a sprain or two. I think."The first words your soulmate says to you are written on your skin - Keith was born with 'Hi my name is - ' written over his heart.  Lance has 'Holy fuck, are you okay?' scrawled on his arm.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be so much shorter than it is. I don't know what happened. This was supposed to be a little 1K fluff fill for a soulmate AU prompt my best friend gave me a while ago...but it got away from me. 
> 
> I've never written a soulmate/mark AU before, but it's a rather fun trope to play with. I might have to revisit this 'verse sometime. 
> 
> For the record, I have never worked in a zoo nor do I know anything about how Emergency Services works. Please take everything you see here with a large grain of salt. 
> 
> Also, this is totally unedited, sorry for any mistakes!

**Does it Bother Anyone Else (that someone else has your name)**

            _“Hi, my name is – ”_

            Keith glares at the words scribbled across his chest, right over his heart. He has to crane his neck to see them. The handwriting is sloppy, big and loopy in places, tight and jagged in others. Careless.

            Just like his idiot soulmate who couldn’t both to give him a goddamn name. That’s just inconsiderate. (Yes, Keith knows that it hasn’t happened yet, that the First Words are something for the future, but still, if this is the kind of scatterbrained nonsense he has to expect from his soulmate he’s not sure if he wants to know them…that’s a lie, but no one gets to know that).

            Keith knows there are people out there who can’t wait to meet their soulmate, who eagerly await the day the First Words inked on their skin match up with their perfect someone. Keith isn’t one of those people.

            His soulmate is part of him, a bump in the road that will have to be dealt with eventually. (Or not, there are always people whose words don’t match, whose soulmates belong to someone else. Keith should know. His parents didn’t match.) But for now he’s perfectly happy as far away from they of the careless handwriting and blue ink and unknowable name as possible. He’s got a perfectly decent life without them, thank you. Keith doesn’t need anyone or anything, especially someone who won’t even bother to tell him their name.

…

            Lance hates wearing long sleeves, but he spends most of his childhood doing just that – after he got in trouble in second grade for showing off his soulmark at recess. It shoots straight up his right forearm, neat block letters reading out clearly, boldly and profanely _“Holy fuck, are you okay?”_ in bright red ink.

            He thinks it’s the coolest thing ever. His second grade teacher didn’t agree.

            “Are you sure you didn’t write that on your arm, Lance? Don’t lie to me.”

            “No, it’s my soulmate! They want to know if I’m okay!”

            “ _Lance_.”

            “See? They’re asking if I’m okay, right here!” he helpfully points it out to her.

            She sighs. “Cover that up, Lance. That’s a bad word.”

            “Fuck?”

            “Yes.”

            “But it says holy – ”

            “It’s a bad word, please just roll down your sleeves while I call your mom.”

            Lance does it, but reluctantly. He’s proud of his soulmate. He wants to show them off. They’re gonna be great, he just knows it. They have nice handwriting, very neat and tidy. It’s a pretty shade of red too. Everything about his soulmark is _great_.

…

**Fifteen Years Later**

            Keith huffs irritably. Shiro is being lame again. Ever since his brother met one of his own soulmates by spilling a cup of coffee on her (her name is Allura, she’s a grad student who works part-time at the café downtown - the words traced across Shiro’s shoulder blades in hot pink cursive are the coffee order she mispronounced while calling out his beverage, he was so surprised he fumbled his cup and soaked her sweater in café au lait) he has entirely failed to answer any of Keith’s text messages in a timely manner.

            And Keith has been sending some very entertaining text messages.

**To: ShiBro**

Hanging out with the tigers at work

If they eat me, don’t avenge me

I probably deserved it

ThisTigerisBetterThanYou.jpg

See that?

That’s me and my new friend

The tiger

Look, this one has a face-stripe like you

ScarofthePrideLands.jpg

They’ve accepted me as one of their own

I’m disowning you

I’m a tiger now

MeandMyTribe.jpg

            If tiger pics and threatening to disown him doesn’t get Shiro’s attention nothing will. Keith really doesn’t get why soulmates are such a big deal. It’s so dumb. At least Shiro’s finally met both of his. He and Matt’s speculations about their second soulmate have gotten increasingly more annoying as the years have gone by.

            Keith gives the phone a final glare before tucking it into the pocket of his zoo-regulation cargo shorts. Fashionably questionable? Yes. Loaded with super-useful pockets? Also yes.

            He glances over to the enclosure beside him where Rose, one of their Bengal tigers, lounges against the fence.

            “You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with this soulmate crap,” he tells her flatly.

            She flicks her tail at him lazily.

            “Rude.”

            She rolls over and turns her back to him. Great. Now he’s losing arguments with big cats.

            Keith sighs. Time to get back to work.

…

            “Tell me again why we’re at the zoo?” Lance asks, head rotating to take in everything.

            “Because I have to take ‘nature photos’ and you’re an actual child who insisted on being included?” Pidge says dryly.

            “Okay, but why the zoo?”

            “Because taking pictures of trees is dumb when you could be taking pictures of cool animals?”

            Lance hums in agreement, “I think you should title this project ‘lions and tigers and bears, oh my’.”

            “I think I should title this project, Screw Summer School and Gen Ed Credit requirements,” Pidge mutters irritably, snapping a few photos of a nearby lemur.

            “A song by Fall Out Boy,” Lance jokes; shrugging when Pidge raises an eyebrow testily in his direction.

            She sighs, “Just. Why do I need to take a studio art class? I want to be an engineer, not a…photo-taker.”

            “Photographer.”

            She gives him a sour look.

            “Or we could go with photo-taker. If you want. Hey, look, tigers!”

            “Lance, I just want to take some pictures and get out.” Pidge has her classic ‘I-haven’t-slept-more-than-four-hours-in-the-last-twenty-four look on her face, the look that says she is not to be messed with, also she has no room for your bullshit, only red bull and coffee.

            “But come on, _tigers_. You like tigers.”

            “You like tigers.”

            “And so do you, come on!”

            Pidge sighs, “I miss Hunk. Hunk doesn’t drag me through the zoo.”

            “Yeah, well, you’re stuck with me.”

            Hunk got a paid internship this summer – the holy grail of summer college opportunities. Lance can’t even resent him for his success because Hunk is actually an angel. But it means that Lance, who has one unpaid internship at an aquarium and two summer jobs, gets to spend his one afternoon off a week keeping a sleep-deprived Pidge from falling down a manhole. (Hey, it could happen, she’s tiny and exhausted).

            (And okay, yes, he heard zoo and decided he had to be included. Come on, cute animals and over-priced kettlecorn are where it’s _at_.)

            “Come on, Pidge, tigers. Tigers are very photogenic.”

            “Yeah, whatever, let’s go,” she manages to say around an enormous yawn, “Lead the way.”

…

            Keith’s phone buzzes. He pauses, stepping to the edge of the sidewalk and stopping to glance at the screen.

**To: Keith**

When you meet your soulmate

I’m gonna laugh

Specifically at you

A lot

**To: That Jerk I’m Related To**

I’m pretty sure you won’t

Because I won’t be lame about it

Unlike you

Specifically

**To: Keith**

Very mature

**To: That Jerk I’m Related To**

I try

            Keith puts away his phone again. Shiro’s wrong. Keith doesn’t are about whatever mystical connection he’s supposed to have with his so-called ‘perfect someone’. He can’t imagine that it’ll matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. He’s happy without them, he has a good job, a good brother (sure he doesn’t have any other family but that’s just less spending during the holiday season, right? Right?). He doesn’t need anyone else.

            He’s fine.

…

            “HOLY FUCK.”

            “Well that was unexpected.”

            “PIDGE, A BIRD JUST STOLE YOUR CAMERA, IS THAT SERIOUSLY THE BEST YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW?”

            Pidge gives him a blank stare. “Lance. I haven’t slept in 36 hours. I am beyond caring.”

            Lance scoffs at her attitude and goes back to staring at the camera, which is now lodged in a tree. (The bird, despite being strong enough to nab the camera and visually impaired enough to think it was food, wasn’t quite up to hauling it away, or figured out it wasn’t food and abandoned it in a tree. Either way, the camera is now in one of the decorative trees lined up beside an animal enclosure.)

            “A bird stole your camera Pidge.”

            “Yep.”

            “This is why we shouldn’t go places without Hunk.”

            “Yep.”

            “Stuff like this doesn’t happen with him around.”

            “Yep.”

            “Your camera’s in a _tree_.”

            Pidge nods resignedly.

            Lance blinks and looks at her. “Do you want me to get it down for you?”

            She blinks back at him then slowly, very slowly, shakes her head, like the wheels are beginning to turn and she’s hopping onto his train of thought and does not like where it’s going at all. “I don’t think that’s a good idea…”

            “Eh, I climbed trees all the time as a kid. This shouldn’t be a big deal.”

            “Lance…”

            “I’ll be right back.”

            (Lance did spend his entire childhood climbing trees, but he stopped after he broke his arm when he was ten. The cast covered up his soulmark. He wrote it on there in red Sharpie – although his moms made him scratch out the F-bomb – but it wasn’t in the right handwriting and it wasn’t the same. He missed it.)

…

            Keith looks up and groans out lound when he sees some idiot climbing a tree next to Tiffany and Teal’s enclosure. The tigers are asleep (they’re siblings, a brother and a sister, adolescents, the sweetest, most playful things, but not very aware of their own strength) and this guy is going to, at best, disturb them, and at worst, hurt himself horribly.

            Keith hates patrons. Why can’t his whole job just be playing with tigers? They don’t sue you if they get hurt doing something stupid.

            Keith jogs over, ready to yell at the idiot attempting to scale the tree. He stops short because, a.) the Idiot Patron has spotted him, and b.) the Idiot Patron is actually the Hot Patron and Keith’s forgotten how words work.

            Luckily Hot/Idiot Patron does not seem to suffering form a sudden inability to form simple sentences. He’s also managed to get pretty far up the tree since Keith first spotted him, the branch he’s perched on leaning precariously close to the top of the Tiffany and Teal’s enclosure’s fence. He’s reaching forward, trying to snag a camera that’s gotten rather improbably caught in the upper reaches of the tree, and not quite getting it.

            “Hi, my name is – ” Hot/Idiot Patron starts to say before gravity takes hold and inevitable happens.

            He slides off the branch an into the tiger enclosure.

            Great, that hadn’t even been _on_ Keith’s list of worst-case scenarios.

            “Holy fuck,” he hears himself shouting as Hot/Idiot Patron hits the ground with a painful thud, “Are you okay?”

…

            Lance had a whole statement planned out when he caught sight of the cute zookeeper glaring up at him from the ground.

            _“Hi, my name is Lance, my buddy Pidge’s camera got stuck in this tree, I’m trying to get it down but it’s too far away, can you get a ladder and help me out here?”_

            He managed to say a grand total of five words of his planned statement before he was sliding off his branch and into what looks quite a bit like a tiger enclosure. But hey, he grabbed the camera on his way down. Right before he blacks out he’s pretty sure he hears someone asking if he’s okay.

            That’s nice. That’s something his soulmate would say.

…

            Keith really hopes he doesn’t get fired for this. “You, you’re his friend?” he asks the only other person on the footpath, a short, skinny girl with messy hair and dangerously huge dark circles under her eyes. She looks familiar, like maybe he’s met her before, but Keith can’t be sure.

            She nods, “I can’t believe that just happened. This day just gets weirder and weirder.”

            “Yeah, yeah, call, uh 911. I don’t know how hurt your friend is but he might need medical attention,” he pauses, taking off his boots, and grabs the walkie-talkie off his belt and throws it at her, “Radio my boss, tell them what’s going on.”

            “Uh, dude what are you doing?”

            It’s a fair question. Keith’s about 50% sure there was some sort of training on what to do if someone ends up in an animal enclosure. Keith’s 100% sure that if there was one such training, he doesn’t remember any of it. So he does the only thing he can think of – he climbs the fence, using his now boot-less feet to find footholds as he clambers up and swings himself over the top.

            “I’m checking on your friend,” Keith explains over his shoulder.

            She nods mutely, she looks a lot like Matt after a few too many nights in the lab…oh shit, is that Matt’s _sister_? Fuck. Well, Keith can deal with that later.

            First, he has to make sure Tiffany and Teal don’t get any ideas about the hot idiot human in their midst.

…

            Lance comes to with his head pillowed on someone’s very lean thigh, his ears ringing and his visions a little fuzzy. He hurts all over. He closes his eyes again. Maybe if he tries hard enough he can wake up not hurting.

            “Hey, no, you stay awake,” a voice orders above him, presumably the owner of the thigh Lance is currently using as a pillow.

            “Heeeey…” Lance tries to grin charmingly. It is probably significantly less effective in this particular situation.

            “There are medical professionals on the way, just stay conscious if you can, okay? Also, you’re an idiot.” The face floating above him is rather pretty, Lance thinks in that meditative way that only really comes when reality is just a smidge too much for normal emotional responses. Messy dark hair, dark eyes (Lance can’t tell what color they are, maybe grey, or blue-black or purple-indigo), and a bright splash of sunburn across the bridge of a sharply defined nose and cheekbones.

            “You are really pretty,” Lance tells the Zoo Angel, as he’s dubbed the guy in the quiet of his brain.

            “Forgive me if I take that under advisement,” Zoo Angel says dryly, “I’m pretty sure you’re concussed.”

            ‘That was a lot of long words,” is Lance’s contribution to this conversation.

            “Okay.”

            “What’s that sound?”

            “That’s the tigers. They’re mostly asleep over there. They sometimes make that chuffing noise at each other.”

            Lance blinks and tries to turn his head around, looking for the tigers, “What? Tigers? Oh. Right. We’re in a zoo. But where are the tigers?”

            Zoo Angel sighs, “Stop doing that, you’ll hurt yourself.”

            “I wanna know where the tigers are.”

            “They’re over there,” Zoo Angel gestures somewhere outside Lance’s sightline.

            “They should come over here so I can see them.”

            “They should stay safely over there where they aren’t bothering us. I’m just glad you don’t have any open wounds or we’d have a problem.”

            Lance brightens at that. Hey, he’s not bleeding! Good job, past-Lance! “Awesome, I’m not bleeding.”

            “Bare minimum achieved,” Zoo Angel says dryly.

            Lance hums happily. Well, as happily as he can hum when his whole body feels like a kickball someone just punted across the field. He wonders when those medical professionals will get here. He’s really hoping he hasn’t broken anything. That would suck. Wait. What if he broke his arm again? That would really suck. He doesn’t want another cast.

            “Do you think my arm’s broken?” he asks Zoo Angel. He doesn’t think Zoo Angel would lie to him about something this important.

            “No.”

            “Good. Broken arms suck. I broke my arm when I was ten. Couldn’t see my soulmark for a month. Cuz of the cast. That sucked. Hey, wanna see my soulmark?”

…

            Keith is sure by now that the attractive idiot is Very Concussed. But at least he’s conscious and talking, if by talking you mean rambling quasi-coherently. Keith feels a little guilty – he doesn’t technically need to have the guy’s head in his lap. Just…the guy fell and he was hurt and he wasn’t waking up those first few moments and leaving someone with his face in the dirt seemed really unfair. And it was a very nice face. Too nice for the dirt, definitely.

            The thud had disturbed the tigers slightly, both had shifted and Teal’s head had come up, but they’d resettled quickly enough and then the Hot Idiot had woken up and seemed perfectly happy to keep resting his head on Keith’s thigh so Keith feels simultaneously very warm and fuzzy inside and kind of like a creeper.

            The guy is talking now, chattering away, really. Keith’s on auto-pilot answering him, attention split between watching for Emergency Services and admiring the way the sunshine lights up Hot Idiot’s tawny-bronze skin, the cute way his nose turns up a little at the end and they way his eyes dance even when one pupil is bigger than the other.

            Yeah, Keith’s a creeper.

            But then the guy is shoving up one sleeve and blabbering about soulmarks and Keith feels a new kind of awkward. This guy has a _soulmate_ ; he’s ogling someone’s _soulmate_. And judging by the earnest joy on the guy’s face when he talks about his Mark he must really love his soulmate. (Admittedly, Keith has a soulmate too, but it’s not like his has ever done anything for him, didn’t even bother to give him a _name_ for god’s sake).

            “wanna see my soulmark?”

            And Keith does see the guy’s soulmark and…and it’s in Keith’s handwriting. And it’s exactly what he shouted when this beautiful _moron_ fell out of a tree and into a tiger enclosure.

            Well. Fuck.

            And of course that’s when Emergency Services shows up.

…

            “Lance, you magnificent idiot,” is Pidge’s initial comment upon Lance’s release from the hospital’s clutches. She’s standing outside his room, one fist on her hip, the other holding up a phone with Hunk on speaker-phone.

            _“Hey, buddy, how’re you doing?”_ Hunk asks.

            “Everything hurts. I’ve got a concussion. Really dizzy. New sympathy for you, my dude, motion sickness sucks.”

            “It’s what you get for being dumb,” Pidge says on top of Hunk saying: _“I’m so sorry man. Make sure Pidge gets you guys a taxi back to the apartment, okay?”_

            “What, you don’t trust us on public transit?”

            _“You turned going to the zoo into a hospital trip, buddy.”_

“Fair point.” Lance winces. The fluorescent lights are killing his eyes. “Sorry, man, but can Pidge hang up now? All the lights and the noise and my head…”

            _“Yeah, I’ll see you guys back at the apartment. I’ll make you some chicken noodle soup, okay?”_

“Best roomie ever. Pidge, you’ve been demoted.”

            Pidge rolls her eyes and says her own goodbyes to Hunk before hanging up. “Oh, by the way, Lance, your soulmate’s in the waiting room.”

            Lance almost passes out all over again. “WHAT.” He immediately regrets shouting, but seriously, Pidge, you couldn’t mention this sooner?

            She shrugs, “He seemed a little freaked out about the whole thing.”

            “Oh god, it’s not an EMT is it? I promised Mom I wouldn’t meet my soulmate in an ambulance.” He’s already trying to figure out how to spin this so his moms are the least amount of worried. He’ll probably tell Mama about it first, maybe she can figure out a way to tell Mom without terrifying her. Or making her Molly-Weasley-level mad.

            “Nope. It’s the guy from the zoo,” Pidge has a malicious smile on her face. That’s a warning sign in and of itself. “The one you fell out of a tree in front of? The one who cradled you in his arms until Emergency Services arrived?”

            “Zoo Angel is my soulmate?”

            Pidge _cackles_. “You call him ‘Zoo Angel’ is this just too good!”

            Lance is pretty sure ‘good’ means ‘blackmail material for the next century’.

…

            “Shiro.” A lifetime of situational conditioning has trained Keith to call his brother in case of any emergency large or small (and yes, a small emergency is a thing that happens – see The Time Keith Tried to Cook and Set the Microwave on Fire for further details), “I have good news and bad news.”

            _“Okay, shoot_.”

            “I met my soulmate today.”

            _“Good news?”_

“Maybe. Bad news is he’s an idiot who fell in a tiger enclosure at the zoo trying to get a camera out of tree.”

_“Oh my god, is he okay?”_

            “Concussion and lots of bruises and a sprain or two. I think. I badgered a nurse until she told me.”

            “ _Keith – ”_

            “Shut up, I was worried. Good news, I was not fired for not remembering the protocol for when a patron falls in an enclosure.”

            _“Okay, that’s great.”_

Keith sighs, “So basically, bad news is my soulmate’s an idiot so I’m hanging out in the hospital waiting room until he gets out of here. Good news, his idiocy didn’t get me fired. So-so news, one of his roommates is Matt’s sister.”

            _“But you met him, and he’s mostly okay and you’re mostly okay. Sounds like everything’s fine,”_ Shiro’s using his soothing-big-brother tone. Keith resents the tone. Shiro is clearly not getting the ‘I have a massive problem and need help’ subtext Keith is clearly screaming at him via flat monotone and mild sarcasm.

            Time for drastic measures, then, “Shiro, what if he doesn’t remember me!” Keith blurts out all in one breath so it sounds more like ‘shirowhatifhedoesn’trememberme’ than anything else.

            Silence on the other end of the line, then, _“Keith, I’m sure your soulmate isn’t going to_ forget _you.”_

            “You don’t know that! You met your soulmates like a normal person! There were no concussions or hospital visits involved!”

            _“Well, I burned Allura with the coffee.”_

            “Shut up and help me, Shiro!”

            His brother sighs, _“Keith, kiddo, calm down.”_

“I am calm!” Keith is not calm.

            _“Why are you so worried about your soulmate forgetting you? I’m pretty sure everything about falling into a tiger enclosure is very memorable.”_ Damn Shiro and his Reasonable Voice of Reason.

            “I googled concussions. Short-term memory loss is a possibility. Also, sudden adrenaline rushes will often ‘edit’ memory. That’s why people sometimes have amnesia after stressful events.”

            _“Keith, I told you to stay off WebMD,”_ Shiro scolds gently.

            “The doctors wouldn’t talk to me and the nurse was not very forthcoming,” Keith grumbles.

            _“Keith, your soulmate is not going to forget you. And even if he did, you can just reintroduce yourself. It’s not that hard.”_

Shiro clearly does not understand how stressful interacting with other human beings is. Keith will take a grumpy tiger over the awkward hell explaining who he is to his own fucking _gorgeous_ soulmate any day. But Keith understands that Shiro does not understand this and that Shiro is trying his best to be supportive the only way he knows how. So Keith smiles and nods and says, “Okay, thanks, Shiro.”

            _“Make sure you do it, Keith. Walk up to him and introduce yourself. Don’t let this go, you’ll regret it if you do. And it’ll be really weird later.”_

            Dammit, why does Shiro know him so well? It’s not fair. “Okay, Shiro. Goodbye Shiro.”

            _“Do what I told you, Keith.”_

            Keith hangs up. Now he has to figure out what to say to his soulmate.

…

            Pidge is right, his soulmate is still there, fidgeting in an uncomfortable waiting-room chair when Lance emerges from the hospital proper. Lance didn’t disbelieve Pidge when she said Zoo Angel was still there (and seriously, he needs to stop thinking that, that’s straight-up embarrassing) but seeing him there is a whole new level of confirmation. That’s his _soulmate_ , that’s the person he’s been waiting for forever. And he’s arching a skeptical eyebrow and walking over. Fuck. Okay. Um. Lance con totally do this conversation thing, even if Pidge is supporting about half his weight on her shoulder.

            “Hey Keith,” she says, casual, like maybe they’ve chatted while Lance was getting poked and prodded and X-rayed by medical professionals. Lance tries not to be jealous. She knows his _name._

            “Hey Pidge,” Keith’s eyes turn towards Lance, they’re sharp and bright but a little uncertain. “So I see your arm wasn’t broken.”

            Oh, right, he’d kind of flashed his soulmark at this guy. That’s tacky. Admittedly, it’s not that bad considering this turned out to be his soulmate, but would have been real awkward if it hadn’t. Then again, someone who wasn’t his soulmate probably wouldn’t have hung out in a hospital waiting room for him for several hours.

            Lance decides to play it casual. Lance is terrible at playing it casual. “Yep, sprained my wrist though. Other wrist, which is cool. But not, you know…cool-cool because sprained wrists kind of suck…do you want to get coffee sometime? Because you’re really beautiful and I think you’re my actual soulmate and I’ve been waiting for you forever…so yeah…”

            Keith blinks at him, like he’s still trying to sort out the barrage of words. The fluorescent lights are too bright and they’re humming kind of obnoxiously and Lance’s head fucking hurts and he kind of just wants to go home and die quietly of embarrassment.

            “Maybe I could just drive you guys home? If you don’t have a car? They wouldn’t let me ride in the ambulance so followed them here…”

            “Yes,” Pidge says, “That’s a big, giant, preemptive yes,” she turns to Lance, “You can make this weird on your own time, I want a ride home I don’t have to pay for.”

            Lance smiles awkwardly at Keith, “Yeah, a ride home would be great. Our other roommate’s making chicken noodle soup. Would you like to stay for dinner?”

            “Would you like to stay forever?” Pidge quotes Mulan under her breath.

            “Dinner would be great,” Keith says and Pidge and Lance both beam – for different reasons.

…

            Later, in Keith’s car, a little red Audi that’s probably as old as Pidge, Lance says, “Wait, were you quoting Mulan back at Pidge or are you really down for dinner?”

            “How about both?” Keith offers.

            “Both is good.”

...

**Epilogue**

            Lance likes to trace his words on Keith’s chest, tracking the lines and loops and scrawl. “Wow, I was kind of a jerk, not telling you my name.”

            Keith likes to run his fingers up and down the line of text on Lance’s arm, following the arc of his veins, the letters red like blood and Valentine’s hearts and fast cars and sunsets. “I’m pretty sure leading with a curse word is objectively worse.”

            “Oh totally,” Lance plants a kiss right under the arc of the words, right above Keith’s heart, “I had to wear long-sleeve shirts, in the _summer_. It was the worst.”

            Keith leaves a soft kiss, first on ‘holy’, then on ‘fuck’, “Sorry.”

            “Stop being cute or I’ll forgive you.”

            “Love you.”

            “Dammit, now you’re forgiven.” Quiet and then, “You know I love you too?”

            “Mmmhmm.”

            “Good, just checking.”

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title from 'Forest' by 21 Pilots.


End file.
